Jonathan Franzen on Shanghai

The nov­el­ist Jonath­an Fran­zen is skilled at describ­ing the rich and col­our­ful dreams we have about our futures, whilst still man­aging to por­tray the bleak real­ity of life for soci­ety at large (I loved The Cor­rec­tions).

It was all thrill­ing. It was as if the gods of world his­tory had asked, ‘Does some­body want to get into some really unpre­ced­en­tedly deep shit?’ and this place had raised its hands and said ‘Yeah!’ ”